Klaustrophobia
by WordsAblaze
Summary: Klaus fears next to nothing but the one phobia he can never leave behind runs deep, stemming right from the roots of his haunting childhood… Enjoy!


_A/N: Okay so I thought of the pun one night and made a post about it (my tua tumblr is umbrellatattoos btw, in case you've seen it and think I'm stealing ideas) before promptly running out of time entirely but the point is, Klaus is kind of messed up and I like writing about it so here I finally am with a mausoleum fic..._

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**Klaustrophobia**

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The mausoleum.

What a morbid place.

Full of irony, if you ask Klaus; in his opinion, you're meant to bury the dead six feet under, not in a large, makeshift box six inches above.

And you're definitely not meant to put the living in with the dead either but clearly one Reginald Hargreeves hadn't been given the memo about that, which is why Klaus finds himself waking up in the middle of a stone tomb.

"Wha-?" he mumbles to himself.

Sitting up awkwardly, he takes a moment to be confused about what on earth he's doing in somewhere that's so clearly not his room.

He wouldn't have minded waking up in his own room with the young lady who always strokes his hair smiling down at him. She's always nice to him, even if she had practically scared the life out of him in her attempts to communicate.

It'd taken a while but he'd worked out a system with her and she'd been the one to insist on him being Klaus rather than Number Four. Although, his siblings had rolled their eyes at his requests for them to call him 'Klaus' and Reginald Hargreeves had immediately called him a deluded fool - which had hurt more than he cared to admit - so, for now, it was his name and their little secret.

He smiles at the thought, whispering a small "Klaus" to himself and taking another moment to savour the memories of that nice ghost.

And then he sees the flurry of rapidly moving translucent figures and genuinely stops breathing, absolute terror spreading through his heart and starting to rush inside his veins within seconds.

It doesn't last long; he ends up coughing soon enough, spluttering on a lack of air and gulping in oxygen as if he'd never been able to before. Unfortunately, it seems as if the ghosts take offence to him doing something they no longer can as they stop and turn to him with highly insulted looks.

Eyes widening, he glances down at the floor and starts tracing letters into the dust, ignoring the signs of curious movement around him and hoping his kind, stand-in confidant, ghost lady appears.

He then takes deeper, slower breaths and focuses on trying to stop his hands from shaking, humming to himself to block out the selfish questions being thrown at him.

It works until one of the ghosts - a young girl who looks perfectly fine aside from the needle puncture in her neck from which Klaus can deduce she been poisoned - screams right beside him, and he flinches.

She pauses, clearly having noticed his distress, and reaches out, her hand settling on his cheek and sending chills right through him.

He gasps, scrambling backwards, making the mistake of glancing right at her.

She giggles happily and drifts towards him with her small arms outstretched. This is clearly enough of an indication to the other ghosts that Klaus can see them so they pause their tasks and drift up closer to him as well, all yelling individual complaints and requests at the same time.

Klaus can't see anything beyond their desperate faces, can't hear anything over their impossible demands, and can't move at all without coming into contact with their ghostly limbs.

He can't do this.

He hears himself groan.

The walls of the mausoleum sneer at him, trapping him inside, keeping the ghosts inside, making sure he's got no other choice but to be inside their wall of death.

"Stop, stop, please," Klaus whimpers once they start poking at him, flinching away from their every touch.

But they don't stop.

If anything, their fervour seems to become even more frantic and furious.

It feels so much worse than anything he's ever had to experience. Yes, he'd been sensing them since he was a child in a cot, but he hadn't been as aware then and the more understanding he has about what's going on, the harder it is to block out the annoyingly determined ghosts.

He curls away from them desperately, wrapping his arms around himself as best as he can, but they refuse to slow down, refuse to leave him alone, and hushed whimpering continues to spill from his lips.

"Who are you?" A series of disembodied voices demand from him, repeating the phrase over and over and over.

"Leave me alone already!" Klaus means to shout at them but it comes out as a desperate plea that even he cringes at.

"Who do you think you are?" A young woman's scorn.

"Why can you see us?" A condescending old woman's voice.

"What's your name?" A curious man who'd clearly been in some kind of accident squints down at him.

"When'll you help us?" A toddler.

That snaps Klaus out of his frightened daze.

He'd always envisioned everyone in tombs as older people who'd lived life and moved on and left behind loved ones who wanted to give them something more in death but not-

He's such an idiot.

Of course, the dead can be children, he knows that better than most because they'd stayed up all night with him talking and playing games as best as they could and they'd wanted him to explain the tastes of new foods they'd never be able to try, showing him the secret corridors of his house in return.

If they'd been able to do all that, why would they not be buried along with the adults in a tomb?

Klaus stares into the eyes of the little toddler, checking him over to gauge how he died but finding nothing. It must have been an illness, he concludes.

"What's your name?" he asks, more than aware of how his voice is shaking, ignoring the others who start shaking fists at him and sending hollow death threats.

"Name? Name! I have the name! Nanny says I'm Ruben!"

Klaus offers Ruben a shaky smile. "I'm sorry."

"Will you help me now?" Ruben asks innocently, and Klaus shrugs helplessly.

"What can I do?"

Ruben opens his little mouth to reply but a middle-aged businessman in a charred suit pops up right under Klaus' nose first, glaring at him with pure malice.

Klaus yelps and throws himself backwards.

He loses sight of Ruben as the gang of burned ghosts crowd around him, yelling words he doesn't know the meanings of but apparently expecting him to know them anyway.

"Wait, no, Ruben-" he tries.

"Help us-!"

"Who are you-?"

"Do something-!"

Klaus flinches away from their words as if they're physically hurting him.

Why can't they understand, he thinks bitterly, that he can't really do anything except listen and talk to them?

He groans as one of them walks straight through him and backs himself up until he reaches a corner, wrapping his arms around his head to try and shield himself from their impossible, aggressive demands.

His fear rises and rises and rises and rises and rises-

One of them touches him.

Klaus' eyes open in alarm as he looks up, glancing down at his arm and the faint scratch visible there. Even the ghost who'd touched him - a lady with a hole in the centre of her forehead - looks shocked, but then she grins and reaches for him again.

And Klaus is jumping up within seconds, rushing to the door, banging on it desperately, wishing he could put more distance between himself and the other ghosts, his throat pushing out words he can't hear himself saying because the yelling of dead people is too loud.

Some of them touch his back and his shoulders and his hair and he shudders every time, pushing aside the pain from scratches on his fingers and banging harder, registering but not caring about the tears falling from his eyes.

He runs out of energy before anything else and folds in on himself, sinking to his knees in front of the stoic door.

If anyone else had been there, they might have heard the continuous sobs spilling over his lips, but he's alone with the ghosts and not one of them seems to care about him so his sobs go in vain, melting into the darkness.

It might be minutes or it might be hours later but Klaus finally manages to quieten himself down, turning and glaring at the door, at the ceiling, and then each of the walls in turn. That does nothing, of course, but it gives him some kind of satisfaction and a renewed determination.

Fists slamming onto the door frantically, he starts yelling as wildly as he can.

"Let me out! I've had enough! I don't want to be here! Let me leave!"

Then, when his cries fall on not deaf but dead or no ears at all, depending on how you look at it, his words become more jumbled and panicked.

"Please! Open the door! I can't- They're too loud! Please, help! Help me, please! Anyone- Let me- Please!"

He's met with nothing.

Instead of opening, the door seems to glower at him, the walls blurring in his vision and the confining ceiling pushing down on his hope and threatening to dissolve it.

He keeps his breathing as calm as possible, pacing in circles to avoid the ghosts as best as he can, flinching away from their cold touches and shuddering when their pale fingers manage to establish contact.

Time loses logic as it goes on and he finds himself muttering, yelling, sobbing, doing anything he can to try and pretend he isn't where he is.

He must have collapsed at some point because the next time he wakes up, it's to the feeling of someone gently nudging him with a pointed shoe that can only belong to one person.

"Dad?" Klaus mumbles groggily.

A sigh. "Do not refer to me as such, Number Four, unless you wish to be placed in isolation yet again."

Klaus jerks upright, hope filling his numb limbs as he looks up to see Reginald Hargreeves peering down at him, faint rays of the sun from behind him causing his features to blend together into one shadowy silhouette.

"Were those injuries self-inflicted or did you make contact with any of the deceased?"

Klaus opens his mouth and finds himself coughing, his face going red as he recovers and clears his throat awkwardly. "It was the ghosts, they- I can- I mean, they could, uh, touch."

"Now, that is interesting."

"It is?" Klaus asks, a small smile flickering on his face at the thought of something having gone right, something good coming out of his terrifying experience.

That familiar frown returns. "Yes, but do you know what would be more interesting?"

"Uhm, no?" Klaus offers, something like dismay appearing as a weight in his stomach.

"To see if your abilities can become even more tangible at night."

Then the silhouette is gone and with it, the light.

"NO!" The scream throws itself out of Klaus before he can stop it and without thinking, he lunges forward, his hands reaching for something, anything that can stop the door from closing.

But it's too late.

He's locked inside the darkness again and it's so much worse than before because this time, he knows what time it is. It's common knowledge that ghosts and spirits - and everything in between - are much stronger, much more driven, at night, and he is not at all ready to face them.

They cackle and scream and prod and poke and Klaus spends the whole night either dodging their attempts at latching onto him or trying various, unsuccessful methods of blocking them out entirely.

Sleep doesn't even register as an option to him and, by the time the door finally creaks open, he's unwillingly acquired more knowledge about dead people than he has about anything else.

"Good to see you're still alive, Number Four," a voice Klaus now despises tells him as fresh rays of sun fall over his battered skin, "now come along and explain what you've learned."

Most of it he'll write down or tell to a voice recorder before eventually forgetting but the one thing he won't forget is how much he hates being stuck inside walls at night.

For the rest of his life, he'll try to avoid sleeping under a ceiling as fiercely as Luther avoids disappointing their adoptive Father. He won't always be able to do so because of forced return trips, military-style curfews, various arrests, and guards at rehab centres, but he'll try.

He doesn't know it yet but, one day, he'll willingly become what everyone else would class as homeless but what he would call free because accusatory labels are far better than nights filled with pure fear and faint stars behind a polluted sky are infinitely better than cold, uncaring ceilings that threaten to encourage the anger of lost souls.

Frankly, the dead can't give most people anything but they did manage to give Klaus claustrophobia.

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_Thanks for reading! Leave a review with thoughts? See you next time I get round to writing another tua fic! x_


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